Men's Brains + Pretty Faces = ?

What happens in a guy's brain when he sees a pretty face? Partially, calculating how much seeing that face again would be worth to him. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center used brain-imaging to study college-age men's brains while they watched a sequence of female faces interspersed with images of money go by. Later, the participants were able to view more or less attractive faces if they *spent *more or less money. And the brain-scan results show...there is a correlation between looking at a pretty face and the part of your brain that measures value. "One part of the frontal cortex of our participants' brains increased in activation to more attractive faces," said senior author Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology & neuroscience at Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Duke, on Science Daily. "A nearby brain region's activation also predicted those faces' economic value—specifically, how much money that person would be willing to trade to see another face of similar attractiveness." They plan to do future studies on what cues other than faces would trigger this part of the brain—in men and women.